With Delfino joining Gusto as a second fine Italian restaurant in newly chic Roslindale Square, one tends to forget the historically poor level of Italian-American dining in all the high-numbered wards of Boston. Bostonians have always liked Italian food, and many no longer consider it Òethnic,Ó but they haven’t eaten much of it outside the North End and other traditional restaurant zones. Italian immigrant families moved north and took their restaurants with them, making it surprisingly difficult to get a plate of homemade pasta in all of Dorchester, Hyde Park, and West Roxbury, never mind Roslindale and Jamaica Plain.
But Delfino isn’t just good for the neighborhood; it would be highly competitive in any restaurant zone. The only concession it makes to the location is one I would like to see made downtown more often: Delfino offers modestly priced salads and simple pastas, along with a cluster of 15 wines just under $20. The menu also offers a core of options built around linguine, five sauces, and seafood. The linguine is good imported pasta, consistently undercooked — about twice as crunchy as what I’d call al dente. The sauces are all good, and the seafood is nicely handled: we didn’t have a single overcooked shrimp all night.
And if you don’t like chewy pasta, the pappardelle with grilled shrimp ($13.95) is sheets of melting-soft pasta with an excellent red sauce, just enough ricotta, and wisps of spinach to suggest loose-leaf lasagna of the gods. The four grilled shrimp have a nice hint of char, but it’s really a pasta dish to come back to many times.
Before the meal, Delfino serves a basket of very fine white bread, and what turns out to be equally fine virgin olive oil that sits in a cruet. Among the appetizers, fried calamari ($9.95) takes a new direction by distributing the nuggets of squid all through a salad of field greens. The squid pieces are dry-fried in very little batter, so they are worth picking out. Roasted-vegetable antipasto ($9.95) includes nicely roasted red pepper, eggplant, mushrooms, and — the star — fennel root; but it also serves up fresh Italian salami and really superb fresh mozzarella with shredded fresh basil. Vegetarians may be surprised, all others pleased. Broccoli ÒraabÓ runs a little bitter in a sautŽ with also-bitter garlic and hot pepper. I enjoyed it thoroughly, but most people with a sweeter palate are not attracted to the Italian sprouting broccoli. (Though I still think everyone should grab the similar-looking, sweeter Chinese broccoli whenever it’s on a menu.)
The low-price starter is caesar salad ($4.95), but the dressing is lifeless and the croutons are the same superb bread gone hard as a meteorite. A daily-special appetizer of grilled scallops pointed the other way, toward a high-end bistro. Four small sea scallops, each with noticeable char, were placed on a shaped puddle of sauce and centered on a cabbage-onion sautŽ.
A similarly chef-ish entrŽe special was coq au vin ($15.95), which drew quite a lot of free-range-chicken flavor out of half a small bird. Although the wine must have been white, and wasn’t discernible, the usual flavorings of the stew-style coq au vin were spread out distinctly underneath: tiny white onions, cubes of bacon, and bits of mushroom. This is what happens when chefs get hold of a peasant stew: they take it apart and make each component distinct. The soul of the stew is lost, but the chicken had so much flavor I’ll take the deal. Good mashed potatoes beneath, as well.
Another winner is the penne pasta with porcini; a shrimp add-in brought it up to $16.95. Like the pappardelle, the penne were cooked through, but their quill shape remained distinctive. The kitchen designates its Òpink sauceÓ for this dish, and it’s a good choice. Red sauce is moderated with a fraction of bŽchamel (what Ohioans call Òmilk gravyÓ), and this makes it a little stickier for the larger pasta shape. The downside is that the pieces of porcini mushroom — Boletus edulis, my favorite wild mushroom — can be tasted only when you are actually eating one of them. A real mushroom lover would cook the mushrooms into a sauce, carrying their flavor further into the pasta.
If someone won’t eat pasta, Delfino offers options like Òthree-seedÓ swordfish. Ours was a remarkably light, white piece of fish, crusted with sesame seeds, poppy seeds, and a few fennel seeds. Given that the fish was not strong-flavored, it was kind of like eating an ÒeverythingÓ bagel. The platter was redeemed with truly wonderful grilled asparagus, however.
Now, the chewy-linguine matrix. You can get the linguine with any of the five sauces (red, fra diablo, Òpink,Ó pesto, or garlic-oil). Add calamari or mussels for $11.95, shrimp or scallops for $14.95. Or get them all in a frutti di mare ($16.95), with a few littleneck clams as well. The garlic-oil sauce is nicely tilted toward the garlic, but most impressive is that all the seafood is cooked right: plump shellfish, toothsome squid, and shrimp at their best.
Delfino has a nice wine list, with a nice cluster of wines around $5.50 per glass, $19.95 per bottle. The list gets more Italian as it gets pricier. At the bottom of things we tried the Blackstone merlot, which had some dark fruit but a little alcohol flavor at the finish, and an Old Farm zinfandel, with more spice and bite. I’d like to try the zin again in another six months, and I’d suggest serving both of them a little cooler than room temperature. But these are good food wines for the dishes served here.
Desserts are still developing. The people’s choice is probably the tiramisu ($5.95), a familiar square of creamy trifle with a good balance of cocoa and espresso flavors. A chef’s touch is evident in the poached pear ($5.95): it’s white like the chicken (this chef doesn’t poach in red wine, apparently), split down the middle like a game bird, and covered with creamy mascarpone cheese (think sour cream gone to college). The nice flavor accent is a hint of honey. Coffee is very good; cappuccino still hadn’t arrived at press time.
The room is a former bank with high ceilings. Flower-patterned fabric panels hung on the walls have no chance against the open kitchen and quarry-tile floors. And it’s often loud, as it has filled in a neighborhood starved for restaurants. The tables are dressed in red linen with white paper on top, a new variation of the high-low bistro spirit. Waitrons are in black, cooks and bussers in white, yet a nice informality reigns. Service is generally quite good. I don’t fully approve of not taking reservations in an area with few other walk-in restaurants, but I understand that the policy is intended to favor the walking-distance neighbors. I also think that slapping an automatic 20 percent tip on a table as small as six is kind of a downtown policy for a neighborhood place, even one that plants itself in both worlds of Italian dining — the hearty family place and the chefly bistro/trattoria.
But with North and South End parking worse than ever, Delfino is a strong reason to turn the car the other way and make an evening of it in Roslindale Square.
Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com.
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